


Lucky

by TheClassiestHat



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Episode: s01e04 The Hand That Rocks the Mabel, Family Feels, Gen, Inspired By Tumblr, Mute Dipper Pines, Rated for some gore toward the beginning, Some Dipcifica, not ship-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-01-31 00:10:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12664281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheClassiestHat/pseuds/TheClassiestHat
Summary: It was an awfully close call, that moment when Gideon Gleeful was about to ensure that Dipper could never lie to him again. It's lucky, isn't it, that Mabel arrived just in the nick of time. Imagine the consequences if she had been just a little too late.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you who are subscribed to me because of It's Gonna Get Ghostly, don't worry, I'm still just as dedicated to that fic as ever and have new chapters in the works. However, I recently came across a tumblr post contemplating what might have happened if The Hand That Rocks the Mabel had ended... badly. And the gears in my head started turning, and I just had to start writing.

They all kept telling him how lucky he was.

Apparently, an injury of this nature could have easily been fatal. Any number of complications, blood loss or strangulation or cutting precisely the wrong tube, could have meant the end for him.

“You’re lucky your sister was on the scene so fast,” a nurse told him when he was conscious enough to understand when people spoke to him. “No time wasted. I’d hate to see what things would have looked like if the ambulance got there just a minute later.”

Yes, Mabel had been there not a second after the deed was done, and he should have been grateful for that at least. He couldn’t blame her for not having gotten there a few seconds sooner.

“The blood loss from an injury like that, it could have done you in if it had gone on much longer,” an EMT said when she came by to check up on his state. “It was awfully lucky we got in there so quickly. Timing can be everything, you know. Don't underestimate the importance of timing. A single minute can make all the difference in the world.”

He could have figured that out for himself. He was the one who had to deal with it firsthand, after all. And even though he was out of the woods now, every time he let his thoughts wander back to the growing puddle of crimson on the floor around him, pooling from the faucet of blood pouring out of his mouth, he felt like he was going to pass out again.

“Did you know that you’re AB-positive?” another nurse, the one who had been in charge of blood transfusions, asked. “Your blood type, I mean. You know what’s special about AB-positive? It’s the universal receiver. You can have any other blood type transfused into you, and your body will still accept it just fine. Lucky you, huh?”

Fascinating. He hadn’t actually known his blood type before, simply because he’d never cared to ask. It certainly wasn’t at the top of his mind when he saw that AB-positive blood glinting off the silvery blades of the lamb shears as Gideon hid them behind his back, as if keeping Mabel from seeing them would also keep her from noticing the figure on the floor behind him struggling not to practically drown in his own blood.

“That will happen, if it’s cut at the root like that.” Or so he was told by the brusque medical intern who checked his vitals in the recovery room and who, apparently, wasn’t particularly concerned about keeping up a good bedside manner. “The hypoglossus and styloglossus were pretty much cut clean through, and it seems he got the facial artery as well. He just nicked it, though, didn’t open it all the way, and it would have been much worse if you were cut just a little farther back – could’ve hit the jugular. So, hey, you lucked out.”

It was hard to imagine that cutting deeper was even a possibility. At the time, with those shears in his mouth, ripping at his tongue with no regard to precision or efficiency, he couldn’t imagine it being worse. It isn’t easy to judge how much damage was being done while it was happening, but in those seconds that felt like hours, he could have sworn that Gideon was tearing at everything he could hope to reach.

“He sure went for the gusto, didn’t he?” the doctor asked him, in a tone that almost seemed to suggest that he should have been flattered someone would take the time to do such a thorough job of mutilating him. “We got the damaged tonsils removed, and patched up the epiglottis and vestibular fold. Your vocal fold is damaged, but he didn’t reach the actual vocal cords. So, it may be a strain on you, but you should still be able to vocalize. You got lucky in that regard.”

He wasn’t sure whose idea it was, but the hospital staff seemed to have gotten it into their heads that if they were able to explain what had happened in technical detail, as if they were simply running through the answers to questions on a test in some med school class, it would somehow make the events seem less horrific. It didn’t. He neither needed nor wanted to know the names of the muscles and veins that were damaged, or why this one could be repaired or this other one would never fully work again. When the damage was being done, the little elements had been blurred together into a single and formless blob of agony. The precise details of what was happening didn’t seem nearly as important as the big picture.

“The whole attack seemed awfully haphazard,” the doctor said, “So it’s extremely lucky that the damage was localized to the mouth as much as it was. Injury to your pharynx was minimal, and your esophagus is unscathed. The assailant seemed to have one goal, and must have been intent on sticking to it.”

That was another thing they kept doing, pointing out ways that the situation could have been worse and expecting him to be overjoyed that they hadn’t happened. Maybe they were trying to give him a point of comparison so that what had happened didn’t seem as bad, relatively, but all it did was add new elements to the nightmares where what had happened played over and over again in his head.

“We got the jaw back into place, and we’ll need to keep the bandaging on for a few days, but it’ll be good as new in no time. We’re lucky it was just dislocated; a jaw that’s fractured or broken is just awful to deal with while it heals up.”

“I know having stitches in your mouth is uncomfortable, but it’s just a few, and it’ll heal fast. If the cut had been deeper it could have gone straight through your cheek, you know, so you can count yourself lucky you don’t have to deal with _that_ mess.”

“Those cuts around your lips are actually pretty shallow. Don’t even need stitches. In fact, odds are you won’t even be left with a scar. How lucky is that?”

Even the police officer he talked to seemed to just want to put a positive spin on things. He didn’t recognize the cop who had come to take his statement, a solidly built no-nonsense type woman who he’d never seen around Blubs or Durland but seemed infinitely more competent, leaving him to wonder just how those two had managed to outrank her.

“You don’t need to worry about anything,” she said to him as she closed her notebook, which was filled far more by his handwriting than by her own, seeing as answering her questions aloud wasn’t really an option. “We’ve got enough eyewitness evidence that there won’t be a shadow of a doubt about what went down. And so you know, this county has no qualms about trying people as adults, so if you’re wanting to see this guy get a fitting penalty, you’re lucky this happened here in Gravity Falls.”

They all kept telling him how lucky he was, but as Dipper Pines lay in that hospital bed, excruciatingly aware of the sensation of every bandage fiber, every stitch, and, most of all, that tauntingly empty space in his mouth where his tongue used to be, he felt like the least lucky person in the world.


	2. Chapter 2

Dipper had wanted nothing more than to go home from the instant he had been moved out of the ICU and into a room in the pediatrics ward. Once everything had been stitched up or bandaged, most of the remaining treatment for the next several days consisted primarily of just waiting for the healing process to work its magic, which grew boring as soon as it started.

Mabel was doing everything she could think of to help her brother pass the time. She had lugged every book Dipper had brought to Gravity Falls with him into his room, as well as library books and books of sudoku and crossword puzzles that Stan had bought at the supermarket (he wasn’t sure whether or not he heard air quotes around the word “bought”, and he decided not to ask about it). She brought him his Nintendo DS and charger, card games and board games that she played with him, DVDs played on a laptop on loan from Soos – basically anything she could think of that might provide a bit of entertainment. The doctors only put their foot down at her attempt to bring in Nerf guns.

She was there constantly, not missing a single minute of visiting hours, and Dipper couldn’t help but notice that she seemed more talkative than usual, even by Mabel standards. She kept up a near constant babble and didn’t let a single thought go unspoken.

And he knew perfectly well why this was. Everything Mabel had done during the days in the hospital were geared toward the express purpose of keeping Dipper distracted from the thought of why he was there in the first place. So, constant talking meant that there were no instances of looming silence to remind of it. He was also aware that, despite her going through endless conversation topics in order to fill the hours, she conspicuously avoided making any mention of his condition or the events that had led to it.

Honestly, he was grateful for it. Especially considering that it was the only thing he could think about once Stan took her back home for the evening, and in spurts even while she was there.

Although, after the first few days, he got his stitches removed and the doctors started moving from the rest-and-recovery phase and into the phase where they had him start practicing living without a tongue, and he found himself missing the boredom.

It wasn’t as if Dipper didn’t realize that this was going to affect his life, but it wasn’t until this second phase, which the staff called ‘transitional therapy’, that it really hit him just how big that effect would be. For one thing, he knew that solid foods would probably be out of the question, but he hadn’t realized that liquids would prove difficult as well – he’d never noticed that he used his tongue much for that. The first few times he and the therapist on call had worked on him figuring out how to swallow water without a tongue, he’d wound up soaked and barely any more quenched than before.

He would return from those sessions fuming with frustration, even though the primary doctor assigned to him cheerfully assured him that it always takes a while to get the hang of it and there was no need to be discouraged. Dr. Kulkarni was like that with everything, stubbornly optimistic and never without a smile on his face. He was a somewhat older man, evidenced by the fact that his thick black hair was graying at the temples and around the ears, and apparently he’d been working in this same hospital since his twenties, so Dipper would have thought the man would have turned jaded by now, but the doctor remained steadily chipper, face wrinkled by the omnipresent smile and laugh lines magnified through his thick glasses. After a while it started to wear on Dipper’s nerves.

Mabel, on the other hand, loved Dr. Kulkarni, and even asked him for his shirt size once, promising to make him a sweater when she got the chance. “I don’t get why you say he annoys you,” she told him during one of her visits. “He’s great. I would hang out with him around the clock if I could.”

 _Of course you would_ , Dipper wrote. _He’s basically you in a lab coat_.

That was main substitute for talking now: writing whatever he wanted to say down in a notebook and passing it to whoever he was talking to. It was slow, it was useless in the dark, and it was difficult to “talk” to more than one or two people at a time this way, but it was something. The option of using text-to-speech engines on phones and computers was discussed, and when Dipper tried it, it did solve two of those problems, but it also didn’t take him long to decide that he would rather grab a scalpel and stab his eardrums out than listen to that robotic Microsoft-Sam-like voice one more time. So, he stuck to writing.

On one occasion, while he was writing out a response during a conversation with Stan, his uncle had remarked that Dipper was extremely lucky he was ambidextrous, since he could regularly switch which hand he wrote with and stave off carpal tunnel syndrome. Dipper stopped writing then; he shut the notebook and set down his pencil and crossed his arms and stared out the window and silently made it clear that the conversation was over.

He was already sick and tired of hearing the hospital staff constantly tell him how lucky he was. He didn’t need Grunkle Stan to start doing it too.

Stan had let it go, leaving Dipper’s room and giving him his space. He still, after all, had plenty to do at the hospital aside from casual visiting. Any pretense Stan had kept up during the short time his niece and nephew had been there of gruffness and reluctance to have them around was dropped the moment he had gotten that phone call about what had happened to Dipper. Suddenly he had transformed into a responsible if not overbearing guardian, and he had made it his job to learn everything about the situation he possibly could and prepare for Dipper’s return to the real world.

He badgered the staff with questions about every piece of equipment in the room, every tiny aspect of treatment. Dipper couldn’t get so much as a single needle prick without Stan demanding to know everything about it and why it was needed. He could tell the staff was growing weary of it. On the day they removed his stitches, Stan had confronted one of the nurses with about a dozen questions about infection risks, and she had handed him off to another nurse, claiming she’d been paged elsewhere; Dipper was positive her pager hadn’t gone off.

Stan sat in on a lot of the transitional therapy sessions as well. It was understandable; Stan would be the one in charge of him once he was out of the hospital, so of course he needed to know about any adjustments that needed to made. That didn’t mean it didn’t leave Dipper feeling self-conscious as hell, though. It didn’t matter how much the therapists told him that having to relearn some skills was nothing to be embarrassed about – when he practiced brushing his teeth without a tongue (which he found to his dismay he would now need to start doing half a dozen times a day, since it turned out saliva was pretty important in keeping teeth clean and protected and he had to make up for that), the last thing he wanted was another human being seeing him dribbling suds out of his mouth and trying not to choke on toothpaste. It was mortifying.

He asked the therapist if he could just forget about the tooth-brushing and prepare for dentures instead. She said no.

The part he hated most, though, was the new method he had to use to “eat”. Solid food was no longer an option, and even once Dipper ever managed to master the art of swallowing beverages, he couldn’t rely on subsisting on that alone. So, he was introduced to the G-tube, which he loathed immediately. Part of it, he thought, was that he had only ever seen these things on people in nursing homes or people who were more or less comatose in hospital beds, and having this in common left Dipper feeling frail and helpless, no matter how irrational the feeling was. What was more, they trained Stan on how to operate the tube as well, and if he’d thought he was self-conscious being watched by his uncle during other parts of the therapy, it was nothing compared to Stan learning how to insert a tube into him and feed him. And Dipper simply couldn’t bring himself to watch when the process was going on, or to look at the content flowing through, or even glance down at the stoma in his stomach when the tube wasn’t in it.

At the very least, it did manage to motivate him to practice liquid-swallowing with renewed fervor, since the more he improved at it, the less he would have to see of that stupid tube.

One of the few things that he didn’t work on in therapy was speech. Dr. Kulkarni had for once been pragmatic enough to admit to Dipper that this was a skill that he would never be able to fully recover, since without a tongue it was impossible for him to even say so much as his own name, but the doctor was sufficiently optimistic to say that, even with the damage in his throat, he would probably still be able to vocalize, to make _some_ sort of sound, and he insisted that it could still prove useful in communication or in emergencies (though he didn’t specify in what sort of emergency he thought it would be useful).

Dr. Kulkarni had sat down with Dipper and said he wanted to test it, to see how much voice he had left so he could decide what could be helped by behavioral therapy. “I know it’s been quite a few days since you last talked,” he said, “So even if your voice is in perfect working order, it may still sound a little strained, just from being out of practice a bit, but that’s nothing to worry about. I just want to see whether it’s still usable. We’ll go simple here, all right? I just want you to say ‘aah’, like you’re at the dentist. Like this.”

He demonstrated, which Dipper thought was unbelievably patronizing, but he let it slide. Dr. Kulkarni was in pediatrics, so maybe he’d just been working with a lot of three-year-olds lately and it had carried over. Dipper obliged him, but it only took half a second of him saying ‘aah’ before he snapped his mouth shut again, eyes wide. He had figured his voice just would have been hoarse – he certainly had not been expecting that weak, dry croak that came out of his mouth.

Dr. Kulkarni, however, beamed at him. “See, you _do_ still have a voice!”

Dipper slowly lifted his hands to his face to lightly clap them over his mouth. Dr. Kulkarni must be out of his mind. That wasn’t a voice; if anything, that was a dying frog that had somehow lodged itself in Dipper’s trachea. And it was an awful, awful sound that Dipper did not want to hear coming from anyone or anything again, let alone himself.

“It’s going to take work, of course,” the doctor was saying, scrawling on his clipboard, “And I really think that the most important thing is to keep in practice, keep exercising those vocal cords. Dr. Risser’s our resident speech pathologist, I can set up a time to meet with her soon, so we should – ” He paused when he finally looked up and saw Dipper shaking his head ‘no’. “What’s the problem?”

Dipper reached over to his bedside table to pick up his notebook and pencil, and he wrote, _I don’t want a speech pathologist_.

“You’re going to need one if you want to get that voice working again,” Dr. Kulkarni said with a smile. “I know it’s not really going to be the same voice you had before, but it’s still something, and I really want you to at least try.”

 _I’d rather not_ , Dipper wrote, shaking his head again.

Dr. Kulkarni sighed and set his clipboard down on his lap, no longer smiling, which was a rarity for him. “Listen, Mason,” he said. Dipper scowled darkly; for someone who was apparently smart enough to become a doctor, this guy was absolutely awful at remembering what name his patient went by. It took him a couple of second to interpret the scowl, and when he did, he gave a sheepish little half-laugh and continued, “Sorry. Listen, Dipper, I know that everything that’s going on right now is a lot. I understand that you’re frustrated, and angry, and maybe even a little scared. But you’re making progress, you really are, even if you don’t think you are, and I don’t want you to stop now, okay? It’s just like anything else you’re doing in you’re transitional therapy – we’re not going to be able to make it as good as new, but we’ll still be able to make it better. So, come on, if you don’t try the speech therapy, your voice box is just going to atrophy, and that’s just no good.”

Dipper was silent for a long moment while he stared at Dr. Kulkarni, and then for another long moment as he stared at his notebook. Finally, he lifted his pencil and wrote, _Okay_.

“Okay, you’ll see the speech pathologist?” Dr. Kulkarni asked, face starting to light up again.

 _Okay, my voice box is going to atrophy_.

The doctor frowned, but, to Dipper’s relief, he didn’t push the issue. He did, however, consult Stan about it later that day, out in the hall by his room and just loud enough that Dipper could hear it through the space where the door was ajar as he pretended to nap. Apparently if his guardian said he had to go through the therapy, that superseded his own refusal.

Thankfully, though, Stan seemed to be leaning more toward Dipper’s side. “Look, cut the kid a break,” he said. “You’re throwin’ enough therapy at him already, and I think he’s got some kind of hang-up about his voice anyhow. I’d say let this one slide.”

“Mr. Pines, I really think that it would be beneficial to – ”

“Tell you what, if he changes his mind at some point, we’ll call you. Maybe once he’s settled more into – into all this, he’ll wanna give it a whirl. For now, I dunno, learning to make noises that don’t even count as speech just seems like low priority.”

Dr. Kulkarni must have agreed at least a little, since he dropped the issue, not mentioning it for the rest of Dipper’s hospital stay, which actually didn’t last much longer. A couple of days later, when the injuries in his mouth passed Dr. Kulkarni’s inspection and the behavior therapist cleared him to be able to go into the real world without running the risk of killing himself with a drinking fountain, the Pines family began the process of packing up all the belongings that had wound up in his hospital room and preparing to head home.

Dipper’s very last piece of transitional therapy was briefing on how to handle emergencies; Dr. Kulkarni ran through what he should do if he starting choking on something he drank, how to handle any infection on his tongue-stump (that wasn’t the word the doctor used, but it was accurate, so Dipper always thought of it as such), how 9-1-1 Silent Call Procedure worked. He divulged all this information sternly, repeating everything to make sure the Pineses remembered it and constantly emphasizing how important this was to know; it was as if he fully expected Dipper to run into every emergency in the book within the next week. To be fair, though, the hospital staff did know him as the kid who’d been rushed into the emergency room half-murdered with a missing tongue, so that sort of first impression could logically lead to people thinking of him as danger-prone.

He received a referee whistle from Dr. Kulkarni, who told him he could use it in place of yelling if any situation came up where he needed to get people’s attention fast – Mabel pouted when he nixed her idea of having Dipper carry an airhorn around in a holster. Dipper pocketed the whistle with a nod of thanks just as Stan came into the lobby, returning from filling out the exit paperwork. Dr. Kulkarni bid them goodbye, with a final reminder to Stan that he could call him if he needed anything, anything at all, and went back to his office.

Stan cleared his throat and lifted the box of Dipper’s books that they were bringing back to the Shack. “Well, kid,” he said, “You ready to go home?”

Dipper wasn’t sure he was. The whole time he’d been here in the hospital, time had dragged along at a snail’s pace, every second stretching out to wear his patience thin, but now it was all feeling like a blur, as if he’d rushed through it without getting a chance to take it in and arriving at the end abruptly and unceremoniously. Was that possible, for his stay to have felt so long and so short all at once?

But he nodded, even taking the liberty of leading the way out the front doors. It didn’t matter whether or not he was ready; having to go back to real life after all that had happened wasn’t a choice, but an inevitability, and there was nothing to be gained from delaying it any further.


End file.
